Your SharePoint intranet in Office 365 is a connected workplace. Imagine your entire company moving through information life cycles – through creation and dissemination – with ease and coordination. It is an intranet built for teamwork– to keep people informed, engaged and moving forward.

Read on to learn what’s coming for your intranet – across team sites, communication sites, hub sites, news, pages, web parts, mobile apps and more. We’re excited to share this with you for the first time and look forward to working with you as a trusted partner to achieve your desired outcomes.

Microsoft Teams, teamwork, collaboration and SharePoint team sites

At work, it is important for every team member to streamline efforts and stay on the same page. Connected SharePoint team sites provide a central location to manage team files, input and connect to important data, and share timely news. And with insight into what drives the most engagement and value, people can course correct and optimize for greatest impact.

Today, for teamwork powered by SharePoint team sites, we are announcing:

All the important SharePoint capabilities surface within Microsoft Teams. Already today, team members can highlight SharePoint files, lists, pages, news, and more – right inside of the Microsoft Teams user experience. Soon they can:

Access the full-power of SharePoint document library files experience inside Microsoft Teams. We are bringing the full power of the SharePoint document library experience to Microsoft Teams. Work together on files with previews, pinned items, metadata, Flows and more – powerful, consistent capabilities no matter where you work with your files. This new experience with files will accrue to your Outlook Online experience, too!Get the full power of a SharePoint library when you work with your files in Microsoft Teams

Connect a SharePoint team site to a Microsoft Teams team in one click. If you’re group-connected team site is not connected to a chat-based hub for teamwork, then it’s just one click of the new Connect to Teams button in bottom-left corner of your site that gets you one.

See that a Teams channel is associated to a folder within the SharePoint library. Now it’s easy to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel & chat associated to it – right from within the SharePoint user interface.

More easily pick news articles and lists when adding a SharePoint tab to a Teams’ channel. When you add a tab in Teams, you can tab between available lists, pages and news items to quickly bring them into your hub for teamwork. They’re your tabs, use them.

Group-connected SharePoint team site updates. When you share and work together, you need the tools and digital workspaces to communicate, access data, and stay productive. With employer expectations changing, employees are expected to be creative and to think critically. To further support this, we’re introducing:

New Microsoft Planner integrations. This is Planner for the team as a full-page app. Simply click New > Plan, and start managing team tasks right inside the SharePoint user experience.Add a Planner Plan from within SharePoint in Office 365 (click New > Plan)

Group inbox activity visible within site activities. Beyond important site activities, like files modifications and published news, now you will see additional important email activity that’s happening in the group inbox.

Modern team sites available on-premises within SharePoint Server 2019. Get the benefits of “going modern” on-premises. Team sites in SharePoint Server 2019 will have modern home pages (which give access to modern web parts and pages), modern lists and libraries, and will reflow and look beautiful inside the SharePoint mobile apps. Note: these sites are not “group-connected” as that requires the use of Office 365 groups only available in Office 365.

SharePoint is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams in Office 365. Use SharePoint team sites to manage content and share it with your team members via their hub for teamwork - Microsoft Teams. Create a group-connected site today, and start sharing.

Inform and engage with rich, engaging organizational news and communication site updates

SharePoint powers your intranet to better promote and organize people, content and activities throughout your connected workplace. The sites that you create – of all types – are at the center. You create sites in seconds, and they are mobile ready from the get-go. They support various scenarios like internal cross-company campaigns, product launches, events and more. As you grow, your intranet evolves as an immersive, business-critical asset for the company.

We’re pleased to announce the following innovations across intranet sites, news and page management.

Today, we’re excited to share how news evolves to ensure your message lands with users—across devices, geographies, and time zones. You can engage your audience about important efforts in a more-targeted fashion.

Select which site sources you want to pull content in from – news web parts filter news from a variety of source sites, filtering based on content you want to show, in the layout you find most conducive to your overall site vision.

Hub site news web part update – the unique ‘hub layout’ in the news web part for SharePoint hub sites will provide additional capabilities like pinning news articles, a new compact layout, and carousel support.Choose from a new variety of news layouts to best promote your news on your pages.

Save for later – you can now save news articles to catch up on later, right from the Web interface of your intranet - as you can today on mobile. Simply click Save for later from the bottom of the news article and it gets added to your saved list, accessible from the Me tab in the SharePoint mobile app. You will also be able to access your saved list from SharePoint home.Now you will be able to save pages and news to read later, right from the Web interface. Click "Save for later" at the bottom of any page or news article.

@mentions in news comments – similar to Outlook, it is now possible to @mention someone who has access to the news article within its comments and they will be notified and brought into the discussion. Did we @mention to you that there’s no easier way to loop someone in? 😉

Deem specific sites as “organizational news sources” – as news rolls up to people across their SharePoint home in Office 365, or via the news tab in their SharePoint mobile all, the news that comes from “organizational news source” sites will get special visual treatment bubbling up to the top of one’s view.

Page management updates. The balance of a modern intranet rests in between the dynamic display of information and the ability to better curate and target who can see what – all without customization and without page proliferation. With this coming innovation, communication sites are ready to tackle your most demanding portal scenarios.

Today, we’re pleased to share how you will control who views what content, or portions of content, and when it appears (or disappears) in or from their personalized sphere of information.

Audience targeting – you can better define what news articles and pages appear on the home experience of your site by configuring what is visible to specific groups. Each person will have a unique experience that complies with what you wish them to view without creating multiple audience-specific sites, you can serve them all from within a more centralized location with a personalized, targeted experience. Audience targeting support will be enabled in news, pages and other web parts so that you can define and target who best to reach with content and site experiences.You will be able to control how pages and parts of pages appear to different people ad groups. This example shows a web part with tailor content by group permissions.

Page approval – establish a new and custom Microsoft Flow flows for approval. Simply name your flow, add the person who will approve your page, save it as a draft, submit for approval. Once approved, the page status gets updated to “published” and is visible to your intended readers. Approvals for news posts work out of the box thanks to integration with Microsoft Flow. Of which, you, too, can further customize your workflow to meet the needs of your specific approval process.Kick off inline review for pages and news. Click the "Submit for approval" button and enter your reviewers email address.

Content organization (aka, page metadata & content filtering) – better organize your pages in libraries, and influence how they are viewed based on specific criteria (metadata) that you apply to the page itself. You choose what region or role, what page type or page status – and then present views that make it possible for people to see, or not see, the page based on how they meet that criteria.Add specific properties to a page (as metadata) from within the page details pane.

SharePoint hub sites and communication sites evolve. Hub sites and communication sites offer rich experiences across your intranet. As business goals and team structures evolve, so too must your sites and the content that lives within them. We continue to add functionality to make it easier to create and configure any sites intent and outcome that you need throughout your intranet.

Add rich colors to the hub site header – you will now have choices beyond the color white. It’ll be easier and more flexible to adhere to your preferred company theme and brand colors across more aspects of the sites and pages.

Approvals for hub site association – a flexible approval process further empowers hub site owners and site owners to make requests and programmatically adapt to changes within their growing, dynamic intranet.

Site scripting during hub site association – once a site gets associated to a hub site, it not only inherits the theme of the hub site, it can now be further configured using powerful site scripting methods to enforce permissions, shared metadata, preferred content management, brand elements and policies.Program site scripts to run automatically when a site is associated to a hub site to adhere to preferences for that family of sites.

Communication sites on-premises in SharePoint Server 2019 – like the benefits of “going modern” on-premises with team sites, SharePoint communication sites can be created and configured within SharePoint Server 2019.

New and updated web parts. Sites pull in content from across Office 365. To do this dynamically, and with flexibility, SharePoint news articles and pages use powerful, data-rich web parts, which you can configure to your needs as you design the look, feel and content of the information you share.

Weather – allow authors to configure showing the web part to show weather information provided by MSN Weather for a given location.You can now add the weather of any city to a page, and text overlay for images on your pages and news.

Document library and lists web parts updates – It’s even easier to engage with documents and lists on a modern page with tile view and drag and drop upload. Now with custom views, grouping, sorting, filtering, column formatting, and drag & drop upload.

Stream updates – no matter where you view a news article or page, you can expect that videos playing from Stream will look and playback beautifully – even when you are viewing them within the SharePoint mobile app. There, too, are channel improvements to help view and playback a complete set of videos in the context of your site or news article.

Yammer updates – when you add a Yammer web part to a site home page or a news article, you can better able the preferred scoping of the groups that can be scoped to that site. We’ve also updated the interface to enhance how people can engage in the discussion – with richer feed with interactions like liking, @mentioning, adding content, and more.

In all, we encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create the sites they need. Once established, associate them to hub sites to organize related sites and projects. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing dynamic, data-rich news articles.

Keeping connected in the go – Find what you need

Take your intranet with you to stay connected and informed about important content, news, sites and people while on the go – for those in-between moments. You can easily get back to what’s relevant to you, alongside powerful search capabilities to find what you need, plus provide feedback via comments and likes – all to keep work moving forward.

We’re pleased to share the latest round of mobile innovations – all driven by customer use and feedback. This is the most significant update we’ve ever done to our SharePoint mobile apps. We’ve simplified the apps to help people focus on the tasks they’ve told us they engage daily. This improved information architecture to make it fast and easy to find and work with the people and content you are looking for.

A new Find tab – What was three is now one, and it’s a super powerful, personal tab infused with AI. The new Find tab makes it the easiest way ever to connect with expertise and knowledge across your organization. It brings a best-in-class mobile search experience, with an intelligent understanding of what you work on, how you work, and how your colleagues’ work relates to you. The new Find tab collapses Sites, Links, People and Search into one, streamlined experience. It, too, is where you will find quick answers, notifications, sites, people and more – in an efficient, tailored flow of what you’re looking for, even before you go looking.The Find tab, coming to the SharePoint mobile app, uses AI to help you find people, content, and answers to your questions while on the go.

Direct document library access – as you tap into a SharePoint document library, you will stay within the SharePoint mobile app experience (for viewing and navigating) more before taken through the integrated connection to the OneDrive app - where you can perform richer actions on files and folders.

@mentions in comments – the same as mentioned above applies to @mentions in comments via the SharePoint mobile app; like Outlook, it is now possible to @mention someone within the comments of a SharePoint news article and that person will be notified and brought into the discussion.

Notifications for page likes – you’ll receive a notification when someone clicks the Like button on a news article you published. How do you like that? If you do like it, you’ll be notified 😉.

Try more and more of what SharePoint offers, and let us know what you think

We want to empower you and every person on your team to achieve more. Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Q: When is this all being released in Office 365?

A: The above blog marks the disclosure of numerous feature and capability announcements. Our goal is to release all the items to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 before end of calendar year 2018. You can expect future blogs and admin message center posts to raise attention to specific change management dates per each item to designate initial availability roll out in Office 365, with refined information about timing and duration of roll out.

Q: What roles do Office 365 Groups, SharePoint team sites, and Microsoft Teams all play when used together?

A: Office 365 Groups helps manage the list of team members who work together (group objects are stored in Azure Active Directory (AAD)); members can be a part of numerous groups. They then leverage team sites to manage their content and information by using news, pages, document libraries, lists and business apps. Microsoft Teams comes into play for the team’s ongoing conversation. It’s possible to share a document stored in the team site directly into the chat as a link. Members can also showcase news articles, pages, or the full site from within the tabs of Microsoft Teams channels – while ensuring that all content is stored and managed in SharePoint.

Q: When should I use a team site, and when should I use a communication site?

A: Your SharePoint team site lets you share content, knowledge, news and apps with your group as collaborate on a project. A communication site lets you tell your story, share your work, and showcase your product across the organization.

So much here addresses ‘gaps’ I have spoken of here on this Community. Lots to unpick here! One thought: looking across at the Microsoft Teams roadmap makes me think that format will work for SharePoint going forward. SharePoint spaces is certainly the sparkle and style and well done; but great to see key issues addressed here. Well done.

Excited for all the upcoming enhancements, but still wondering when the "News Digest" feature of the Communication Sites will be released. I belong to an organization that still has employees who insist on receiving organizational news via email. The News Digest feature would be a great feature to help drive users back to the our Intranet.

Finally. Hoping we can do things like sync libraries and restore file versions right from within Teams. I really want to prevent users from having to go to Sharepoint as that runs the risk of doing things that breaks teams, like renaming the Channel folder, or putting files in the root folder of a site, which is inaccessible to Teams.

For the news digest feature, we are expecting to start rolling that out after SharePoint conference. As @John Wynne said I posted about this one in another thread on tech community. This one took a bit longer as we found a few experience bugs we wanted to fix before releasing this, and then we briefly paused new rollouts during the SharePoint conference. Should start to see it shortly. @John Sanders

@Eric Davis - we'll be communicating more on organizational news over the coming months. Elements of this like custom metadata support and content approvals and custom flows with Microsoft Flow will be delivered this summer, and more to come.

Just noticed ‘Recommended for Current User’ in the Hub Site news web part update. I know we must wait but just *that* is super useful. It would be great to see a more granular roadmap breakdown to see the ‘running order’ on this work.

Great progress addressing some of the fragmentation that existed between SharePoint and other tools. We look forward to seeing Teams leverage SharePoint full capabilities. That said, Yammer was mentioned lightly in this article, is there any progress with surfacing data/content between Yammer/Sharepoint?

@John Wynne Thanks for posting that slide. I was able to locate that presentation this came from however expecting to see some more tangible news come from the conference relating to Documents Sets, maybe even a demo, time-line, etc. Hopefully it's there and I have missed it.

We have been a long time user of Project Sites and have experienced great value in their collaborative features. Over time we have developed a custom project site template that contains the delivered features, but with issue and risk details as well as custom list for requirements, change orders, etc. However, with the recent rise of Teams I also see great advantage in using Teams in conjunction with Project Online. We have added tabs to Teams to show specific information e.g. schedule , issues, etc. Once we get Skype for Business federation with Teams our adoption will accelerate.

We are considering moving from using Project sites to Teams sites and add issues, risks, etc. That way when someone adds a document to Teams it is posted to the site. Similarly, the OneNote section would be uses for Project notes, etc..

Questions:

What is the future of Project sites as it relates to Teams?

Is our approach correct or should we wait because there will be something coming that will provide better integration between Project Online and Teams?

Looking forward to a lot of these features. Is there any clarity on Modern Pages being folder / library organized? Haven't seen any news with statements regarding new document libraries that can be created just for the new Modern Pages.

@Carlos Cordeiro we have not yet started rolling out the weather web part, but look for it in the near future.

@Thomas Schumert the sites pages library has custom metadata column support coming shortly. We also have many of the same features of doc libs already. What do you need in the pages library to support your scenarios?

@Andy Haon the top 2 I would love to see is #1 moving / coping a page from one site to another just like a document. #2 the ability to create a new library not labeled pages (ex. news, or articles) that works like the "Wiki Page Library" inclusive of the Modern Pages.

The O365 SharePoint team has been making my dreams come true, so hoping these were somewhere I may have accidently overlooked with all of the announcements.

@Mark Kashman, I agree with @David Clay. An idea of the release date of these items would help. I was not able to attend the conference this year and, since nothing was recorded, it is hard to know if dates were mentionned during the talks.

I was expecting more concrete information on the «corporate» features of SharePoint. We need to create a «home» for SharePoint with company news and, ideally, a way to manage multilingual content. I see a lot of what I need in the announcements but I cannot figure out if this will be available by june; september or december.

We need to decide if we need to buy an «in a box solution» like Valo to have decent home within a few weeks / months. If page metadata; audience filtering; curated news and a communication site home are available this summer, we would consider staying within the Microsoft box.

Anything about ease of use and reuse of metadata is great. The thing I'd love to see is site metadata and to be able to view and edit it in the SharePoint admin centre so I could create groups of sites for management purposes. I'd want to tag sites by which faculty and school owned them. Any special handling or development notes. Who the relationship manager was for the site or sites. That sort of thing and rather than do it in a list somewhere I'd like it in the admin centre. Example image.

Good feedback, @Darrel Richardson. There's a lot of goodness coming to the SP admin center in O365. Adding my peer @Bill Baer to review your comments about site metadata; something I think we can all relate to and certainly use from an admin and user pov.

Hi @Denis Tiri. It's based on what can be retrieved from the standard GAL lookup - so should include both AAD and Office 365 groups; which are a part of AAD by default. The best demo is from the SPC18 keynote, though not deep enough to better address your question at this time:

Hi @David Clay & @Benoit Fournier. I hear you both about dates. I don't have further insights to share beyond the fact that our goal going into SPC18 was primarily to show only those things that will land in Targeted Release before Ignite 2018; barring things like #SharePoint spaces where we were a little more explicit. We'll ensure to make the right communications go out as we move to send message center posts to admins and targeted blogs with greater detail closer to roll out of each feature, or related set of features.

Our intranet partners will always compliment what we offer in the pattern of offering that which we don't yet offer. It's not a terrible thing to get started with a set of projects that do and do not require partners, to set the stage for a real deployment where many sites can be OOTB, or require partner solutions for others, or possibly even still custom sites that leverage the classic SharePoint publishing infrastructure. We will move as fast as we can to deliver what we'v disclosed, and rest assured two thing, 1) we'll keep that pace with future disclosures and news twice a year :-), and 2) our partners will always add value on top where you need it.

Hi @Jonathan BRAUN. We didn't share that level of detail, but certainly inferred a few things where once you have more detail about a page, and the same level of details across all your pages, at least the ones you wish to highlight more programmatically, then you'll be able to pivot and view using that metadata as you'd expect, with us updating common areas to make choices with the column info OOTB, and for you to configure and build custom against the same as well. We'll share more and document more when the feature rolls into Targeted Release - which will start soon for metadata on pages.

Whats the recommended way to handle navigation between hub sites? Like if I am a user in HR hubsite and want to go to IT hub site? How are people doing this? Make them go back to the main custom portal site and then go down the navigation there? Thanks!

Is it OK to start with pages metadata columns before the update is rolled out in July? Meaning, will existing metadata still be there in the metadata panel after the release? Or is there something fundamentally different, that we should wait before creating new columns in the SitePages library?

@Mark Kashman we are on a targeted release tenant. There are a couple of things in this article, not available still in our tenant. Also the new SharePoint app has yet to be seen, or the redesign of it.

At my organization, I frequently hear the need for fixed column headers (so when you scroll down a list, you can understand what column you are looking at); basically the need is for a "freeze panes" type of function that is found in Excel. We do have custom script workarounds, but that is a total pain and is not at all user friendly. Is this on the roadmap (or am I missing something and this feature already exists?)?

With this particular feature release - the GetListItemChangesSinceToken method in the Lists.asmx SharePoint web service no longer defaults a recursive scope. This can obviously be set explicitly in the queryOptions, but because we were relying on the default (as would many) to be recursive, we needed to update our application to support this.

Is there a way to get more detailed changes on SharePoint web service / API changes?

Does anyone knows what are the rules behind the news source option "recommended for current user"? Getting items from all sites that the user is Following? But not only, because i'm getting news from "not followed" sites as well? Is there any documentation on the topic?

When are we going to get much-needed "Totals" in the SharePoint Document Library Modern experience? This was promised by end of 2018 but my org is still stuck using the Classic experience for many libraries due to the lack of this essential feature :(

Does everyone just run their tenant in Targeted Release mode? Mine is not and because of that the road map is incorrect (launched does NOT mean launched for me) plus I have no idea if or when I'll ever see these changes.

@Raphael Guisolan Near as I can tell, if you have permission to the site the news comes from, you'll see the news in the web part that's doing the roll ups. I was hoping the "Relevant To This User" functionality would only be for those who are members of the team, not including people who just so happen to be in the visitors group of the site...which is usually Everyone.

So is Audience Targeting something different than the Relevant To This User setting in the news web part? The roadmap says it is still in development but targeted for the end of 2018. It'd be cool if we had a bit more control over the actual targeting of our news.